The present invention relates generally to e-mail, and more specifically to a technique to verify authenticity of a file attached to an e-mail.
Electronic mail or “e-mail” is well known today. It is typically sent over the Internet, and received and displayed by a recipient's web browser. An e-mail may also include a file attachment. The file attachment is typically displayed as an icon with a name of file adjacent to the icon. If a recipient “clicks on” or otherwise selects the file icon, the recipient's web browser will fetch and open the file.
Many e-mails are unwanted “spam”, i.e. unsolicited advertisements or messages. The spam e-mail may also include attachment files. The attachment file may contain unwanted or offensive text documents, graphics, pictures, audio, or video information.
A computer virus can also be embedded in a file attached to an e-mail. This is the most common method to “infect” the recipient's computer and other computers across a network. For example, a recipient may receive an e-mail with an attached, infected file including a computer program that can be executed within the recipient's computer system. When an infected file is opened, the computer program executes and may disrupt or incapacitate the recipient's computer by corrupting or deleting important programs and/or data files. While less prevalent in number than “spam”, viruses are more disruptive and costly.
A computer virus, when executed at a recipient computer, may also access information contained in the recipient's address book. Then, the virus may mail a copy of itself as a file attached to an e-mail sent by the recipient, to everyone in the recipient's address book. In such a case, the infected file attachment may appear to originate from someone the (new) recipient knows and trusts. Because such files “apparently come” from a reliable source, the likelihood the infection will be spread by unwitting recipients is greatly increased. In those cases, the recipient may wish to ensure that attached or accessed files have been sent by a trustworthy sender rather than by a hacker, prior to exposing his or her computer system to an infected program file.
Known e-mail systems e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 6,553,341 entitled “Method and apparatus for announcing receipt of an electronic message”, provide the capability to automatically read selected portions of an e-mail by using text-to-speech conversion.
An object of the invention is to provide to a recipient information describing content of a received file attachment, before the recipient opens and accesses the received file.
Another object of the invention is to enable a recipient to verify that a received file has been intentionally sent by a person and not automatically sent by a machine, before the recipient opens and accesses the received file.
Another object of the invention is to enable a recipient to verify the identity of the sender or the author of the received file, before the recipient opens the file.